TV execs rarely react to the public's outcry

COMMENTARY

Published 6:30 am, Friday, February 22, 2008

Fans of the Disney Channel cartoon Kim Possible are waging an e-mail campaign to keep the show on the air.

Fans of the Disney Channel cartoon Kim Possible are waging an e-mail campaign to keep the show on the air.

Photo: ABC TV

TV execs rarely react to the public's outcry

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Sometimes you can save your show.

Hardly ever, though. ... Closer to never, really. But every so often a good public outcry can actually get a network exec's attention.

Which is why the Jericho characters are feasting on peanuts.

Also why ABC's execs are getting bags of human hair in the mail. And why I had to adjust my spam filter to guard against the words "Kim" and "Possible."

Fans can get so overheated. This is exactly the response a TV exec hopes his programs have the power to incite. These fans will not only watch a show when it's first on the air, but also buy individual episodes on iTunes, spend time chasing down Internet-only extras on the official Web sites, then buy the box sets of the complete seasons, just to see the deleted scenes.

A show that generates that kind of excitement and cash flow can weather all kinds of mediocre ratings. Which is why Family Guy is back on Fox after being canceled not just once but on two separate occasions. We're talking truly breathtaking DVD sales, people. And count on this: When the cash flies in Hollywood, someone will be there with a big basket to catch it.

Sometimes cash flows for unlikely reasons. NBC's Friday Night Lights can barely draw a crowd (in network terms), but the people who do show up tend to be precisely the sort of wealthy, well-educated types who don't visit most other shows. Advertisers will pay to reach them, so while NBC may have lost its patience, word from Web site TV Land has two other networks/cable channels sniffing around the show with an eye toward taking it on for a junior year.

Fans of ABC's nowhere-near-as-bad-as-people-think-but-still-not-great freshman sitcom Cavemen are trying to drum up similar interest in their clearly endangered show. Thus the campaign to send bags of human hair to the network, à la the hirsute characters they hope to propel into a second season. But can you really motivate people to do your bidding when you're actively grossing them out?

But I can say this for sure: The absurdly aggressive e-mail campaign by fans of a Disney Channel cartoon called Kim Possible has turned me into a fire-breathing partisan. My new purpose in life? Wipe Kim Possible off the face of the Earth, as soon as possible.

Got that, Kim Possible fans? I won't help you save your show. In fact, if it were up to me I'd cancel the show immediately and urge federal legislation to have it banned from these shores. Let's put Kim Possible on the no-fly list. Kim Possible is why Gitmo was built in the first place, and the heck with your habeas and your cartoon corpus.

Speaking of nuts: When the first season of Jericho came to its climax, the villainous leader of the militia from the next town demanded that Skeet Ulrich and the rest of Jericho's forces capitulate to its rule. Would they surrender? Ulrich had a simple answer: "Nuts!"

At which point a bloody battle, and then a fan campaign, were launched. In both cases the forces of darkness were overcome. Or so it seemed.

The second season premiered last week, complete with an unsubtle peanut shout-out near the top of the hour.

Ah, yes. Victory was theirs! The Jericho adventure continues! Only with one problem.

It's just not a very good show.

For one thing, virtually everything Jericho tries to do is already being done, only with more imagination and depth, on ABC's Lost. What hasn't been cribbed from that show echoes elements from 24 and a litany of B movies from the Cold War era.

But don't listen to me. The real judge, as CBS has made more than clear, is the prime-time audience. Which is to say, the ratings.

And in this case the news is nuclear, indeed. Because even after the hype, Jericho launched its second season with significantly fewer viewers than its pilot attracted in the fall of 2006. Worse, CBS did better in the same slot last year with a repeat — a repeat! — of Without a Trace.